Fifty years ago today, on February 20th, 1962, John Glenn — a Marine colonel and aviator, a veteran of World War II and Korea – was strapped into a space capsule so tiny that he could not fully extend his arms. The hatch was bolted down, after which he was blasted into orbit. John Glenn wasn’t the first man to orbit the earth — two Russians had beaten him to that the year before. Nor was he the first American man in space — Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom preceded him, but only making suborbital flights. John Glenn was the first American in orbit, kicking off a new era for the nation.

The flight had its scary moments; a faulty sensor falsely indicated that the entry heat shield wasn’t firmly attached to the spacecraft, and Glenn was told to keep the retrorocket system in place, rather than jettisoning it, to keep the shield itself in place. After three orbits, as he entered, he saw flaming bits fly past the window, and wondered whether it was the then-unneeded retrorockets, or the vital thermal protection. The cabin heated up, and he feared it was a prelude to being incinerated in entry, but he entered safely and splashed down in the Atlantic to be retrieved by the destroyer USS Noa. His first words when he exited the capsule were “It was hot in there.”

So, how much has American spaceflight changed in the half century since that first American went into orbit?

When one goes to the Air and Space Museum and looks at early space-age hardware such as a Mercury capsule, it doesn’t appear to be much advanced over WW II equipment, such as aircraft from that era viewable in other galleries. This isn’t really surprising. It had only been a decade and a half since the end of the war, a span equivalent to now and the mid-nineties, and other than smart phones and tablets, and ubiquitous large-screen televisions and flat-panel displays, people from 1997 would readily recognize most everyday items today.

There were amazing technological advances in the postwar period — jets became routine, supersonic flight was developed, television had reached most homes — but vacuum tubes were still the norm, and technologies like solid-state electronics, fuel cells, and life support were still in their infancy. The builders of Mercury stuck with the best-understood systems, which were still reliable mechanical switches, fuses and gauges, and batteries, that would have been familiar to a designer in the forties. There was no flight computer, not even an analog one. In terms of amenities, its life-support system was crude, without the ability to process carbon dioxide, instead relying on a pure oxygen atmosphere and a short flight duration to prevent a buildup. In terms of toilet facilities, the philosophy was “you should have gone before you left” (one astronaut did have to relieve himself in his suit on the pad as a result of a long launch delay). It had a window, though initially it had only small portholes, and the astronauts had to fight with the structural designers to get a rectangular one as large as they wanted. The backup in the event of a pressure failure was the spacesuit with its own oxygen supply.

But technology did advance. In terms of comfort, there was a great leap forward with the first flight of the Space Shuttle, almost twenty years later, in 1981. Unlike the claustrophobically cramped Mercury and Gemini capsules (Gemini astronauts literally couldn’t get out of their seats, except to go for a spacewalk, and one of the missions lasted a couple weeks), or even the slightly more spacious Apollo command module, it offered a large cabin in which seven crew members could float around. With the advent of the European Spacelab and the Spacehab modules in the payload bay, it offered the capability to serve as a short-duration space station. Its multiple large windows afforded spectacular views of the earth below.

35 Comments, 11 Threads

1.
Johann

Sad that we have to go back fifty years ago to find a genuine hero. Today we look around at the modern Americans and we find very few heroes or for that matter people to whom we looked up. American know how has all but disappeared; all we have are worthless celebrity nitwits who prance around in their drug induced trances making idiotic remarks about the culture. Mark Steyn made the point that a person time traveling from the year 1900 to the year 1950 would be amazed at all the inventions and innovations that came about in such a short time; the telephone, the television, the refrigerator,jet travel etc etc but the same traveler if he continued on to the next sixty years came to 2012 would find basically the same inventions he saw in the 1950s although with a few tweaks. We are no longer progressing but retrogressing and we have to rehash old glories to feel better about ourselves;the same way we keep making and remaking the same films which fifty years ago were considered good because all we can produce today is trash and more trash. O tempora O mores.

Steyn got some of that wrong. The world’s first jet airliner first flew in 1949 but didn’t enter service until 1952. After a series of fatal crashes, the plane was withdrawn from service until the problems were fixed. The Boeing 707 didn’t enter service until many years later. Back then, commercial air travel was very expensive. Today, you can buy a round trip ticket to China starting at about $1000 if you shop around.

The transistor was invented in the late 1940s but didn’t enter the commercial marketplace in any meaningful way until the 1960s. Today, the average home has billions of transistors in devices like computers, cell phones, tablets and a host of other products.

Color TV wasn’t available in 1950. When color TVs did enter the market, they costs hundreds of dollars which would be many thousand dollars when adjusted for inflation. Today, you can buy digital HDTVs starting at a few hundred dollars.

In 1950, the total number of digital computers on Earth was probably less than 100. Today, there are probably more than 100 million computers worldwide with a very high percentage of them connected via the Internet in ways scarcely imaginable in 1950. While I don’t have solid numbers to back up this claim, I’ll state that an average home computer today has more power (CPU speed, RAM, storage) than all of the computers in the world combined up until sometime in the 1970s, if not later.

In 1950, satellites were the domain of science fiction and a few visionaries. Today, they’re so common that most people don’t even realize when they’re using one (such as when you swipe a credit card at an ATM or gas station).

The question is how long you think it takes to get from Glenn V 1.0 to shuttle (i.e. first orbital craft to first working ‘reusable’ and comfortable design) in the private realm. I would think that if there’s profit to be made that the answer is “pretty damn quickly.”

Clearly the shuttle’s 3 gees (or less) is what the private sector would aspire to e.g. shuttling to/from an orbital hotel.

Not sure I understand why NASA is fixated on capsules at all since these are useful only for near space (lunar travel at best?) If the plan is to loft the travel cabin and engines and such in separate launches and then add the ‘nauts later via Orion and use Orion for the cabin access and lifeboat then this starts to make a lot more sense (modularisation.)

#1 Johann

Anyone with an internet connection can now get instant and usable answers to almost any question that can be asked. In the 50′s you seem to miss this would be referred to as magic, as would the modern smart cell phones (i.e. Clarke’s commsats realised.)

Technology is not regressing. It is accelerating and getting cheaper. As Feynmann put it the first half of the 20th century seemed impressive because man was discovering that which was simple to discover. OK, so we discovered all of the low hanging fruit type stuff, and now we’re at the next level. Discovery is a bit more difficult not because we’re enstupidating ourselves, but because it ain’t low hanging fruit.

Use your magical internet connection to look up the technology S curve.

“But the most important difference between human spaceflight then, and now, is that back then sending a man into space, however crudely, was viewed as something that only the government of a superpower could do. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with the recent push back from some in the space community against the new commercial providers, that mindset often remains firmly in place. But to anyone closely following the industry, it is clearly no longer true. Half a century after the first harrowing orbital flight of a brave Marine test pilot, we are on the verge of a new era of competition with multiple private providers, in which flights into space are truly routine, relatively safe, and affordable to large numbers of people, with comfortable destinations.”

Nonsense. False equivalency. Just another press release promising commerical HSF around the corner. Fifty years after Glenn’s three orbits, commerical space has failed to launch, orbit and safely recover anybody. It is going no place fast. The difference is commercial HSF space is fueled by the profit motive. The goal is to make a buck. Glenn’s flight was motivated by geopolitics. And space exploitation is not space exploration.

Context is everything. Glenn was the first American to orbit, but the Russians had already done it. Twice. Gagarin and Titov. In its first three years of operations, NASA had tried to put 28 satellites into orbit. Only 8 succeeded. A commercial firm would not have been capable of abosrbing the costs associated with that kind of failure rate and have gone out of business. That’s why governments do it.

Granted technical reliability has improved over half a century thanks to NASA and government operated and managed space programs with the fiscal largess to absorb the price of failure on the road to progress. Still, Flight Director Chris Kraft noted in his memoirs that missile systems in that period had roughly a 60% success rate. Two of the five Mercury-Atlas test flights experienced mishaps and as Gene Kranz, then a young flight controller, has said Glenn’s MA-6 was either going to be the fourth success or the third failure. It’s doubtful a private enterprised, quarterly driven, commercial firm in 1962 would have accepted those levels of risk and launched Glenn on their own. That’s why governments do it.

That was the state of the technology in that era– and those were the calculated risks facing Glenn, his country and the credibility of the government program and industries in the ‘free world’ affiliated with the flight. Spaceflight- particularly HSF- is an expensive and risky business highly unforgiving of error. That hasn’t changed. That’s why commercial firms haven’t launched, orbited and recovered people. That’s why governments do it.

SpaceX has launched and recovered a Dragon Capsule in late 10 that was about 95% of the way to being able to carry humans. All it needs to work is a life support system that SpaceX is already working onn. Musk stated that a passenger really only needed a SCUBA bottle and a seat and would have had a comfortable ride on that flight. Musk continues to make progress fully man-rating the capsule

Apparently you have. 95%? Utter nonsense. Dragon carried a wheel of cheese and was/is no where close to having an operational, independently verified and flight tested ECS capable of sustaining human life throgh launch, orbital flight, reentry and splash. And it does little to embolden confidence in Master Musk when he makes silly comments like wear scuba gear and go fly– or that he’ll be retiring on Mars. More likely Mars, Pennsylvania.

According to the AP, here’s the score:

Since 1962, 330 Americans have followed Glenn into orbit by way of government funded and managed spacecraft and their programs. By ‘commercial space’— 0.

“Dragon carried a wheel of cheese and was/is no where close to having an operational, independently verified and flight tested ECS capable of sustaining human life throgh launch, orbital flight, reentry and splash.”

By that measure the Shuttle should have never been allowed to fly then. From light-off to SRB separation the Shuttle crew survivability was in the black if there was a mishap. In fact, you should maybe learn a little more of this tragic event called the Challenger disaster before you pass off your so called opinions of how great government run space flight is at insuring crew safety.

“By that measure the Shuttle should have never been allowed to fly then. From light-off to SRB separation the Shuttle crew survivability was in the black if there was a mishap.”

1. You measure poorly. Shuttle had a verified/tested/operational ECS. 2. Guess you never heard of RTLS abort– not that it was much of a safety margin but it was an integral part of the launch profile the flight crews trained to do. Maybe you should read the Rogers Commission report and learn something about how the STS operated circa 1981-86 and why Challenger was lost. How the system was designed and engineered was a given. How it was managed is what killed the crew and lost the vehicle. The fact managers allowed it to operate with a known, recognized and flawed o-ring/joint design, red flagged by engineers down the line,- a critical element in what was supposed to be a ‘fail-safe’ design in its architecture- a system as critical to shuttle as wings are to a plane- is a failure of managment. They blow-bys and burn through were a known problem from several previous flights, not addressed by managment to keep to schedule- you know, because of the pressure to make shuttle a profitable enterprise- and tagged aceptable flight risks. That’s poor engineering and bad managment- not the lack of an operational ECS.

And they’ve been flying people for half a century to Earth orbit and to the moon and back. Commercial space has not launched, orbited or returned anybody. Hence, they’ve certainly earned their zero. Thank you for playing.

Actually, for about 15 of those 50 years, the US government didn’t launch anyone. There was a gap of about 2 years between Mercury and Gemini, another couple years between Gemini and Apollo, 6 years between Apollo and the Shuttle, and about 5 years of down time due to Shuttle accidents.

NASA’s project management has been one of consistent delayed projects and cost overruns. It’s hard to name a single major (>$500 million) NASA project of the last 30-40 years that wasn’t significantly late, over budget, or both.

We as taxpayers are not getting a good return on our investment in NASA.

Mr. Simberg is a shill for comemrcial space and well-known on space forums for his humorlessly poor manners, a weak knowledge of space history and, when exposed for lacking a substantative facts to support a positon, prone to employ personal slurs. But he’s a snappy dresser.

Per its usual trait, every single thing that the pseudonymous troll says, including the fact that I’m a “snappy dresser” (as anyone who has met me can attest) is untrue. But the creature demonstrates once again that it’s easy to be a blatant anonymous liar on the Internet.

Mr. Simberg is a shill for comemrcial space and well-known on space forums for his humorlessly poor manners, a weak knowledge of space history and, when exposed for lacking substantative facts to support a position, prone to employ personal slurs. Ever the the Dapper Dan.

Indeed, ‘rubbish’ about sums up the press releases issued by Master Musk and his Musketeers. Commercial HSF advocates talk, they squawk, they boast, they brag and make grand promises with bold bravado of grand things to come. In fact they do everything but the one thing necessary to earn credibility- fly somebody. Their position is a false equivalency. Because they fly nobody. Fifty years after Glenn and Gagarin and Titov the goal of commercial HSF still eludes. Actions speak louder than words. The bottom line is this- get somebody up around and back down safely. Put somebody up- or, as they say, shut up.

I was eight years old when John Glenn made that flight. I literally grew up with the Space Age.

The difference between then and now was that then we designed systems as simple as possible with as few points of failure as possible, and relied upon the best-of-the-best highly-trained men to operate them. When we started making things complicated and sent school teachers into orbit was when it all went wrong.

The Mercury capsules were extremely simple for several reasons. One was the limited weight that an Atlas rocket could put into orbit back then. Another was that the Mercury program had very limited goals, primarily to prove that humans could survive in space.

There was no on-board computer system so all computations had to take place on the ground. This, combined with the lack of a maneuvering system (the thrusters could only be used for orientation, not for changing the orbit) meant Mercury was incapable of such basic operations as rendezvous and docking.

It’s one thing to make systems simple and require a super trained astronaut to fly it and live. It’s another thing to make a space vehicle that’s reliable and capable of performing a variety of missions.

Where we went wrong was right at the start. President Kennedy wanted to prove that democratic capitalism was better than communism and a command economy. How did go about it? By building a big government command economy system to goto the moon and 50 years later we are still saddled with it.

Kennedy should have asked for bids for a commercial seat price to land on Luna and then let the market determine the design and price. We could still be selling rides to Luna today if he would have actually trusted the very things we were fighting for.

Apollo proved that our Soviet-style space program was better than their Soviet-style space program. That it was too expensive to continue once the goal was achieved was besides the point. The Saturn V, as beautiful and impressive as it was, was the minimal vehicle for the job using the chosen architecture (single launch LRO). Apollo 17 maxed out the capability of the system. They were literally counting the ounces in order to stay on the lunar surface for 3 days. If you wanted to stay longer, you were out of luck because there just wasn’t the capacity. The lunar missions were considered so risky that NASA was happy to end on Apollo 17 despite the fact that the hardware had already been built for 2-3 more missions.

That or it was a one off statement made by a “freshman” administrator who was caught up in a moment of rhetoric and made a overly boisterous claim. It was refuted by the Obama administration and not one bit of policy or decision making from NASA has resulted in anything considered overtly “pro-muslim”. There are plenty of other things to Harp on NASA about with regards to space policy but this isn’t one of them.

I’m not sure what you mean by “freshman” administrator. It was the “Director” of NASA that said it….twice.
Of course it was refuted by the Obama Administration. They also issued a public statement that visitors to the White House named William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were different men with the same names. Riiiight!!!
I do agree with you that there are plenty of things to harp on Obama’s anti-space exploration polices. However, directing NASA that their foremost mission is Muslim Outreach is assinine at best, dangerously scary at worst. Shouldn’t Muslim Outreach be Hillary’s job?